Donald Trump’s Alligator Alcatraz
Nestled in the southwestern Berlin borough of Steglitz-Zehlendorf, Germany, can be found the small locality of Wannsee. It was there on 20 January 1942, in a stately mansion oozing with old world charm known as the villa Am Großen, that 15 senior government officials of Nazi Germany and Schutzstaffel (SS) leaders gathered. The meeting was conducted by one of the most evil men who ever lived, Reinhard Heydrich, the ambitious young deputy to Heinrich Himmler.
The Wannsee Conference was a closed meeting, a Top Secret meeting. No one was to talk about it to anyone. Nothing was to be officially documented. Sparse and cryptic minutes, the only written material to survive that horrid day, were kept by the infamous Adolf Eichmann.
The purpose of the conference was simple. Heydrich outlined to the heads of the German government’s various departments how European Jews were to be rounded up and sent to camps in occupied Poland. They were then to be murdered on an industrial scale unheard of in the annals of human darkness and depravity. It was called the Endgültige Lösung, or Final Solution.
The Germans were fully aware that what they were doing was unspeakably evil, so much so that they went to extreme lengths to hide it from the German people and the world. It’s a latter day irony that those Germans could teach today’s Republicans a thing or two about discretion.
Not only is the outlaw regime of Trump’s thugs busy today building concentration camps across the land to house brown people, they’re bragging about it. They’re selling “merch” about. They are drunk with delight about it.
Not to be outdone by Trump, one such camp created by Florida governor Ron DeSantis, is laughingly referred to as “Alligator Alcatraz,” because it’s being built on top of a disused airport in the Everglades. Alligator Alcatraz merchandise can be had online. You can be the first ghoul in your neighbourhood to own an Alligator Alcatraz t-shirt, or an Alligator Alcatraz beer cooler.
Alligator Alcatraz comes equipped with air conditioning against the blistering Florida heat, top of the line portable bathrooms and comfortable living quarters — for the guards. The prisoners of the concentration camp will live in tents, baking on the hot tarmac in the Florida sun.
That’s where DeSantis will put brown people, including farm workers, restaurant cooks, nannies, fieldhands, warehouse workers, barbers and anyone else who’s brown and he doesn’t want around. Many of them will be in the United States legally. Some of them will even be American citizens. Their real crime, the one Republicans are parading out in the open as red meat for their bigoted MAGA base, is being brown. And DeSantis will show it off to anybody important enough for him to brag to.
DeSantis is funding this execrable enterprise with four hundred and fifty million dollars from FEMA. That money, taken to do evil, will have to be found elsewhere when hurricane season rolls around. Of course, it won’t be found.
Somehow Republicans will blame Joe Biden for lack of FEMA money, because the same kind of evil that the Nazis tried to hide isn’t a bug to Republicans, it’s a feature. They parade it out in the open. They brag about it.
Who knows, maybe when their concentration camps become industrial extermination camps in their own right, Republicans will show the murders on TV. Anyone surprised by that hasn’t been paying attention.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.